Although the Navy did not establish the Special Warfare Operator (SO) rating until 2006, elite groups of Sailors have been carrying Special Warfare Operator duties of one form or another for nearly three-quarters of a century. In 1962, President John Kennedy gave them the designation which today is instantly recognizable: Navy SEALs.
Like the U.S. Army’s United States Green Berets and the Marine Rangers, Navy SEALs are the stuff of legend, with their astonishing exploits documented in books, films, and documentaries. Instead of asking what they do, a better question would be to inquire what
don’t they do. Where do they operate? Essentially anywhere and everywhere: they’ve carried out missions in mountain, urban, desert, jungle, undersea, and even arctic environments. How are they deployed? By parachute, speedboats, rappelling, fast-roping from helicopters, miniature submarines, Humvees, or whatever means are necessary to place them in the operational area. They are experts at intelligence gathering, especially in the field of human intelligence. And if you were to ask a SEAL what weapons and ordnance he’s been trained to use, you shouldn’t be surprised to get “Whatcha got?” for an answer.
Before the establishment of the Special Warfare Operator rating, SEALs were drawn from a variety of source ratings, with SEAL being a job classification rather than a rating unto itself. When Sailors who qualified for the Navy’s Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL and Basic Crewmember Schools, they were required to switch to one of those source ratings—Gunner’s Mate, for example, or Boatswain’s Mate—upon completion of the specialized training. But after the terrorist attacks of 2001, the need for highly trained specialists to fight on the front lines of the Global War on Terror meant that Sailors carrying out Naval Special Warfare operations simply did not have the time to focus their attention on learning the tasks associated with another rating.
The majority of applicants wishing to qualify for the SO rating are in the Navy’s Delayed Entry Program, but those who think they have what it takes to meet the extremely challenging demands of SEAL training may volunteer during their basic training period at the Navy’s Recruit Training Center in Naval Station Great Lakes in Illinois.
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